Hellfire and Loyalty
by CowgirlTEX
Summary: One-shot - I never really stopped to consider why exactly I was so loyal to him. Zoe POV. A little MalxZoe, if you squint. R&R!


**Author's Note:** This was written up out of a couple of hours of having nothing to do on the computer other than think about plot bunnies...I decided to give it a shot. I've never written anything for Firefly before, so this is literally my first foray into Joss Whedon's sandbox of amazing.

Written from Zoe's point of view... : Enjoy!

**Disclaimer**: I own not any of these characters or Joss Whedon. I just worship them.

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I never really stopped to consider the reasons why I was so loyal to him, why I followed him as I did.

I wasn't blindly loyal, so don't even think it. I'd sooner take a shotgun blast to the foot than do something that slapped _that _particular label on me. I was far from blind, far from stupid, and even farther from some pathetic dog that sat quietly and obeyed when I knew something was unfathomably idiotic.

There was something there, though. Some tie between us, an unbreakable bond of friendship, maybe even making him appear as family to me. I would do almost anything for him, because he was 'family'.

The crew--they're all family to me.

Out there in the black, surrounded by nothing but empty air with only a thin sheet of metal protecting you from the coldest, blackest of deaths, family was everything. It was the only thing you had, the only thing you _could_ have. It got real lonely out here, and if you didn't intend to spend time with any of the people you spent weeks on end with, you might as well jump out the air lock and space yourself right then and there.

You grew close to the people on the ship, whether it was by your own intentions, some unseen force out there, or, hell, even the ship itself that brought about the connections. There was no avoiding it. And, especially, after going through a war, it was difficult to avoid being connected to him on some level.

It was more than just a figurative familial tie that my loyalty for him grew out of.

It might've been the commander-and-soldier ranking had somehow still stuck with me, even all these years after the war had ended; rank like that don't just go away, no matter what you tell yourself. You think it's gone, and then when you decide to stick with him through thick and thin afterwards, you realize it never really does. It's like a part of you, something that's been drilled into your head enough times to just be second nature.

And I _had _stuck with him.

We were friends--_are_ friends. After that one fateful battle, I stayed by his side. We wandered, and then he found her: _Serenity._ She didn't look like much at first. Didn't look like anything more than just a pile of junk when he first showed her to me. But, I guess that old earth-that-was saying about judgin' books by their cover really did have some merit of truth to it; she surprised me, she really did.

I could have left him back then. Could have gone my own way after the war, stayed on solid, steady ground, one where I wasn't having to worry about how I'm going to get my next meal, about if the boat under my feet was going to give way and kill us at any moment. I might've even ended up with some high-up job, living on…well, not a nice planet. Wasn't any way you'd find me living anywhere near alliance-controlled space, nice as they may be.

But, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this old boat, _Serenity_, was more a home to me than any fancy--or run-down--house on solid ground could ever be. I just wasn't suited to that kind of a life. That might've explained why I had chosen to enlist with the browncoats in the first place.

He was inexperienced when I first met him in that war. Inexperienced, obnoxious, and smart-mouthed…but he knew damn well what he was doing. It was like the whole war thing was genetically ingrained into him, like he was simply born for it. He was a fast thinker, got us out of a ton of messes we might've not gotten out of had he not been there.

That must've had something to do with my loyalty to him, as well: respect. I respected him as a leader, and as a friend.

Despite many a time he'd seem to make you wonder if he was really cut out for the role as a leader, he wounded up provin' you wrong just the minute later.

It wasn't long being with him on the ship, slowly but surely rounding up a crew to take care of her, that I came to understand what it was about him that truly made him such an outstanding commander.

It was because he cares. In spite of the hard, dark 'I-really-don't-care-about-anyone-or-anything-save-for-me-and-mine', there were times when I saw and finally acknowledged the tiny beads of caring shining out for the tight-knit family he had gathered on the ship, even including the fugitives he had at first threatened to dump on some barren rim world and take off without 'em on several occasions.

His heart still beat warmly--no, stop givin' me looks at that little poetic bit, I'm serious--even after the damage it had sustained from losing his home world, the war, even, if you thought about it hard, his true freedom to really make something of himself.

Of course, he did make something of himself, thought it wasn't as respectable as other things he probably could've done had he not signed up for that war. He did sign up for it, though, and this was the fate he had stuck with and built himself a life from. It put him through hard times, stress, maybe even added a little bitterness to his personality, but he damn well made something of it.

After all that…no, it wasn't with blind loyalty that I followed him. Whatever it was, I'm still not sure, even thinking about all of it. Trying to figure it out just makes my head hurt. There's some things that just can't be understood in this universe.

What it came down to, was that he's part of my family, he's my captain, and he's my friend, and if the path he lead me on was down into the pits of hell…

Well, then, I guess I'm jumpin' into hellfire for him.

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: Click that little purple review button down there, please? I'd like to know what you guys think.


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